This T-Shirt Sewing Robot Could Radically Shift The Apparel Industry : In a soon-to-open Arkansas factory, 21 production lines manned by the Sewbot will be capable of making 1.2 million T-shirts a year–and the ripple effects will soon be felt in garment factories in the developing world. https://www.fastcompany.com/40454692/this-t-shirt-sewing-robot-could-radically-shift-the-apparel-industry
Sewbot–SoftWear Automation’s clothes-making robot–was developed at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center in a process that began a decade ago. In 2012, researchers got a grant from the Defense Department’s tech innovation wing DARPA to develop the concept and formed a company to commercialize the technology. By 2015, the company was selling a more basic version of the robot that could make bath mats and towels. The newest version, to be deployed in the Little Rock factory, can make T-shirts and partially sew jeans Reportedly this sewing robot can make as many T shirts per hour as 17 factory workers and a total of 11 billion T shirts are sold per year. Meanwhile, Amazon filed a patent in April 2017 for “stitch on demand” technology that would sew clothing after an order is placed.

“Modular Robot Self-Heals and Even Redesigns Itself for New Tasks” (9/12/17) https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j55yyg/modular-robot-system-self-heals-and-even-redesigns-itself-for-new-tasks Writing this week in Nature Communications, computer scientist Marco Dorigo and colleagues at Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium describe a robotics system that basically consists of a bunch of little robots that are able to work together to build themselves into different kinds of big robots. “MNS robots thus constitute a new class of robots with capabilities beyond those of any existing machine or biological organism,” Dorigo and co. write. “An MNS robot can split into separate autonomous robots each with an independent brain unit, absorb robotic units with different capabilities into its body, and self-heal by removing or replacing malfunctioning body parts—including a malfunctioning brain unit.”